They Do—finally

Decades After Their First Date, Tom Poston Weds Suzanne Pleshette

There's no story showbiz loves more than the one that begins, "Boy meets girl..." and ends, after a suitable interval, "Boy gets girl." That it took Suzanne Pleshette and Tom Poston, who wed May 11 at Manhattan's City Hall, more than 40 years to arrive at their personal denouement didn't make it any less happy. "Their relationship gives everybody hope that they will find happiness," says their friend Nikki Haskell, the Beverly Hills diet diva, who gave a low-key prenup dinner for the pair at Elaine's restaurant the night before. "It's the American dream come true."

The two met when they costarred in the 1959 Broadway comedy Golden Fleecing. Poston's 1955 marriage to actress Jean Sullivan was on the wane, and after Pleshette's brief 1964 marriage to actor Troy Donahue ended, the two dated. However, they married other people in 1968—businessman Tom Gallagher and homemaker Kay Hudson. In the 1970s they worked together on The Bob Newhart Show, on which Pleshette played Emily, Newhart's wife, and Poston guest-starred as a college friend of Newhart's. (He later costarred in the 1980s Newhart.)

Last summer, grieving over the deaths of their longtime spouses, Pleshette, 64, and Poston, 79, who has three grown children, rediscovered each other—and this time it took. Last fall Poston proposed in time-honored fashion, to Pleshette's alarm. "When he got on his knee," she says, "I thought he fell, and I tried to pick him up."

After the no-frills wedding, Poston and Pleshette dined à deux, then headed out to see The Producers. "They are a romantic duo," says Poston pal Tim Conway. "It's almost embarrassing. You have to put cold water on them."